A rapid warm-up for the Northwest

"Climate change is an additional stress to systems that have already been affected and changed by human activities," says Amy Snover, a research scientist and member of the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group.

Politically, the region - sometimes referred to as "Cascadia" - appears to have heard the message.

Since February, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has been pushing his colleagues in city halls around the country to sign the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

That pact commits them to meet or exceed the Kyoto Protocol standards, reducing greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. So far, 186 US mayors - from Issaquah, Wash. to Laredo, Texas to Schenectady, N.Y. - have signed on.

While it still relies heavily on hydropower dams for electricity (which have environmental problems of a different sort - mainly profound damage to ecosystems that support endangered salmon and other wildlife), Washington State has been building wind farms in its wide-open spaces east of the Cascade Mountains.

In Oregon, Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) is pushing state lawmakers and reluctant auto dealers to adopt California's tougher emission standards for motor vehicles, enacted last year. If Oregon takes that step, Washington State, which shares the market for cars and trucks with its neighbor to the south, will do so also.

Portland, Ore. and surrounding Multnomah County have nudged carbon dioxide emissions to a level below 1990, a first for any major American city.

With help from two new light-rail public transit lines, the planting of some 750,000 carbon-absorbing trees, financial incentives for energy-efficient "green" buildings, and weatherization of more than 10,000 apartments and houses, per capita emissions in Portland dropped 13 percent over the past 10 years. Nationally, there's been an increase of about 1 percent per capita.

Mayor Tom Potter, the city's former police chief, drives a Prius hybrid and promotes Portland as a bike-friendly city with 750 miles of bicycle paths.

Still, officials and scientists around the region agree that more needs to be done.

"We can no longer stop this," says Ack. "We can hope to ameliorate it by mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, but we cannot stop this. So either we ignore it and suffer, or we prepare for it and suffer less."

Urged on by the group of economists, the region's elected officials and agencies now address climate change here on the basis of the "precautionary principle" - acknowledging that they do not know everything about the long-range effects of global warming, but are taking steps now before it's too late.

"It's about hedging," says Dr. Snover. "It's about risk management. It's about acknowledging that uncertainty is not going to go away, expecting to meet surprises, being prepared for that change and designing flexibility right in."

Page: 1 | 2